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Title:Sonority and Reduplication in Nakanai and Nuxalk (Bella Coola)
Authors:Katy Carlson
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Length:40
Abstract:Sonority and Reduplication in Nakanai and Nuxalk (Bella Coola)



Katy Carlson

University of Massachusetts, Amherst





Recent work on reduplication has focused on deriving the segmental

content and shape of a reduplicant from general, non-stipulative

phonological constraints (e.g., work in Generalized Template theory).

This paper shows that markedness constraints on sonority, which are

independently necessary to explain syllabification in many languages,

can account for many properties of reduplication in languages as

disparate as Nakanai and Nuxalk.



Both of these languages have several patterns of partial

reduplication. In the Nakanai patterns, low vowels are preferred

over high ones, and falling-sonority diphthongs are preferred over

rising-sonority ones. These facts are captured by sonority constraints

that favor a maximally sonorous nucleus (the Peak constraints of

Prince and Smolensky 1993), and a sharp sonority rise into the

syllable. In Nuxalk, a normally prefixal reduplicant is infixed,

in order to reduplicate a sonorous consonant or vowel nucleus; this

shows a different portion of the Peak hierarchy at work. The

differences between the two languages' reduplicative patterns stem

from the different rankings of sonority markedness constraints with

respect to Faithfulness and positional constraints.
Type:Paper/tech report
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Article:Version 1